How many tech meetups exist in the UK?

How many tech meetups exist in the UK?
This year’s Tech Nation Report found that there are 3,527 tech meetups taking place across the UK every year. Collectively, these meetups contain over 1.6 million members in 283 different locations.

As part of this year’s report, we created a network diagram to show all of the different areas of technology explored in meetups, which can be viewed here. Out of 400 of the largest groups, the most popular trends were open source, software development and web design. Closely followed by emerging technologies and artificial intelligence, which could suggest that these could be upcoming areas for UK tech.

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During our Tech Nation Report Quiz, we asked our community to guess how many tech meetups there are in UK, and they were really surprised to find out that there were more than 3,500 across the country. Or, some of them were anyway…

“I’m surprised it’s not more. We’ve got loads of meetups happening in Norwich, Ipswich, Cambridge, places like that. I think the rest of the UK needs to catch up on what we’re doing in the East of England,” said Tim Robinson, COO of Tech East, with a very cheeky smile.

Managing director of Elixel, Gavin Jones, says “Hopefully it’s going to carry on increasing, and outside of London as well. I hope more people will do more to raise awareness of digital in their clusters.”

“I’ve been to many of them, especially the free drinks ones.” said Federico Piccinini, who is a community manager for Launch22. As a co-working space Launch22 hosts its fair share of tech meetups and events. “Always, all day, every day. Every day there’s something going on.” Federico says.